"Collecting of equality data by patient opinion"

I have noticed that you collect some equality monitoring data when people submit their stories. What is not clear however, is what you do with this information?

It is also not clear why the categories used by patient opinion are not in line with those used by public authorities? For example you only use very broad categories to describe ethnicity. I do think people should know what this information is used for and how it is used. Thanks

Responses

Thanks for raising these important questions about the additional personal data which Patient Opinion collects.

We very recently added the ability for people using Patient Opinion to add some additional data about themselves: age, gender, ethnicity and disability. We make clear that adding this information is entirely optional.

The main reason for adding the ability to record this information was to enable us to offer the NHS Friends and Family test question, in line with guidance set out by NHS England. The ethnicity categories we have used are those recommended by NHS England.

Although we have a privacy notice on the data collection page which states that “We will share information about the overall mix of people using Patient Opinion in our reports”, I agree we can do better in making explicit how and where this personal data will be used. We’ll add a page to the site about this, and link to it from the data collection page.